Your PCUP, May 2027
Art questions power and privilege.
Your statement of inquiry
Expressionism shows the inner psyche of its main character, usually someone struggling with the world around them who doesn't quite fit in. Because you see everything through their eyes, you feel what life is like without power or privilege and that's how the style questions both.
Go straight to the five stationsThen
Expressionism grew up in Germany around the First World War. A lot of ordinary people came home from the fighting to very little work and savings that were soon worth nothing, while factory owners and the people who'd made money from the war did very well. The American plays came a few years later, in a decade when the rich were getting much richer and factory workers were treated like parts of the machine.
The playwrights wanted to show what an ordinary day felt like from inside the head of a clerk or a ship's stoker, the people nobody at the top was looking at.
Now
You don't have to look far to find people like that today. Think about the workers who build the hotels and towers you pass every day. What is a day like for them from the moment they wake up? Does anyone walking past actually see them? The same goes for people who've had to leave their own country to find work or somewhere safe. Expressionism gives you a way to put that inside view on stage.
Communication
Expressionistic plays communicate through the form as much as the words. Dialogue breaks into short, clipped fragments (the Germans called it Telegrammstil, telegram style) and movement turns robotic and repetitive, until the actor's body looks like part of a machine. Faces and sets are distorted too, so the world looks the way it feels to the main character.
You'll see a lot of this in Berkoff. Because the recording is in Japanese, you'll read much of the meaning from the actors' voices and bodies.
Boundaries
In Büchner's Woyzeck, a poor soldier is ordered about by his Captain and used by the Doctor for medical experiments and he has no way of answering back. That boundary, between the people with power and the man with no voice, runs through every scene.
Büchner wrote it in the 1830s and died before finishing it. It wasn't performed until 1913, just as Expressionism took off and the Expressionists treated it as one of their own.
Fairness and development
Each play asks who does well out of the system and who pays for it. Machinal asks it about women and The Adding Machine asks it about work.
Your PCUP is a station drama.
Expressionist playwrights called this structure Stationendrama, or station drama. The name comes from the Stations of the Cross, where you follow one figure from stop to stop. In From Morning to Midnight, Kaiser follows a bank cashier who steals a fortune through one station after another, as he tries to buy something worth living for, until he ends up in a Salvation Army hall.
It can look like Brecht's episodic structure, but it works the other way round. Brecht's episodes keep you at a distance so that you think, while each station takes you further inside one person's head.
Your PCUP works the same way and you'll go through these five stations in order.
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Station 1, Criterion A(i)
Investigate the style
Find out where Expressionism came from and how it questions power. Then explore three named plays properly, with a real moment from each, rather than listing lots of titles.
Open Station 1 -
Station 2, Criterion A(ii)
Critique Berkoff's Metamorphosis
Watch the Tokyo production on Digital Theatre+ and pick out the Expressionistic techniques in the acting and the staging. Explain how each one communicates the production's artistic intention and connect it to the world Kafka was writing about in 1915.
Open Station 2 -
Station 3, Criterion B
Devise your piece
Pick a starting point with your group and work your ideas out on your feet. Film your rehearsals all the way through so you have a real record of how the piece grew. Write your artistic intention before you perform.
Open Station 3 -
Station 4, Criterion C
Perform it
Perform the finished piece, with the Expressionistic techniques you rehearsed doing the work for you.
Open Station 4 -
Station 5, Criterion D
Evaluate
Look back honestly at the performance and at how far you've come as a theatre maker since Station 1.
Open Station 5
How this section fits with the rest of the site
Everything for this year's PCUP is in these five stations: how to write each part, the mark bands, Expressionistic examples and a checklist to tick off as you go.
The criterion pages (A, B, C and D) explain how each criterion works in any year, using last year's Brecht unit as the example. Use them for structure, but don't borrow their content, because your style and your SOI are different.